PALO ALTO, Calif. – Wait, wait a minute. Incidents like this shouldn’t have happened, especially during the NCAA women’s basketball tournament.
On Sunday night, in a packed home field, a Stanford No. 1 team led by an American pair played as if they were trying to learn the basics – smart placement and passing. is two.
Mississippi, an eight-seeded team rife with transfers, flooded the field in waves, made almost every major shot and seemed to put a body (or three or four) on every Cardinal attempted. make a shot near the basket.
Mississippi never wears out. When Stanford finally sealed the score in the final two minutes, Mississippi’s response was to tighten the defence even further, forcing Cardinal to turn around. Final score: Mississippi leads, 54-49.
What a game. What a time for women’s basketball, where an explosion of talented players and teams, coupled with fundamental changes in college sports, are adding new classes of equal competition.
When the game was over, I watched the entire Mississippi team and their bubbly coach dance on the field and posed for pictures while standing on Cardinal’s logo long after most of the home team’s fans had left. Maples Pavilion.
The Stanford players were in tears and stunned. Haley Jones, an American on the third team, said: “I think I’m in shock. She and her teammate Cameron Brink, this year’s all-American second team, are NCAA champions in 2021.
But the shock did not make Jones take a broader view. This game, she admitted in a press conference, has a deeper meaning than most nasty games.
“We hate to be the ones to make it happen,” she said. “But having an eighth seed like Ole Miss, as talented as they are, says a lot about women’s basketball.
“It’s definitely an evolution for the women’s game.”
To say that such a loss is rare is to underestimate it, especially in women’s basketball, where talent is often concentrated at the top and a lack of depth in the game often shows. in March.
Only the top four seeds have not made it to the round of 16 in the women’s tournament since 1994, when the tournament was expanded to 64 teams.
In contrast, the top 20 seeds failed to make it to the men’s final round of 16 in that span of time. The latest victims to suffer the wrath of defeat just last week: Kansas, which fell to Arkansas, and top seed Purdue, which suffered one of the heaviest losses in NCAA history when he succumbed to 16th seed Fairleigh Dickinson, an outcome occurred. nobody’s frame.
When I asked Mississippi Coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin what her team’s victory meant in women’s basketball, she spoke of the growing pool of talent.
“That’s what I told my team,” said McPhee-McCuin, 40, one of the few Black women to lead a team in this league and a beloved by the players for their unwavering energy. her break.
McPhee-McCuin, who the players refer to as Coach Yo, said she will definitely focus her team on Fairleigh Dickinson’s win over Purdue in the men’s tournament. “We have to normalize that to the women’s game,” she said, noting that, in her view, women are often conditioned to curb their confidence, this can make it much more difficult to kill fancy opponents.
Coach Yo does not lack confidence. She turned a championship-winning Mississippi team in 2020 at the Southeast Conference and made it clear during this trip that she represents change in women’s basketball.
She claims without hesitation that she is part of a new generation of young, aspiring newcomers who have a deep respect for legendary peers like Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer but There are also plans to change the status quo. “I’m the future of women’s basketball,” she said boldly after her team beat tough Gonzaga by 23 points on Friday.
The future will be far away. The women’s game is changing in seismic ways.
Lots of media attention. More buzz in the stadiums. More powerful crowd.
Half a century after Title IX, the landmark act that led to greater opportunities for women and girls in high school and college sports, generations of female players have been playing the game. at a high level, creating an ever-improving talent pool.
More recently, changes in endorsement rules that allow players to profit from their skills have boosted the game. Mississippi is one of the women’s teams to benefit from a pay-per-player collective.
Ten years ago, it was unusual for players to transfer. Now the rules have changed, and movement is the new norm. Coach Yo is known to have said that she arrived at the portal as if she were shopping at the grocery store.
Over the past two seasons, she has brought in eight players from other schools. On the Sunday night before Cardinal, many played key roles, none greater than Myah Taylor, a glittering point guard who starred against rival Mississippi State and scored only 3 points but took the lead. lead her team as if she were conducting a symphony.
Can Ole Miss repeat this kind of performance next weekend?
Can other inferior teams repeat it in future NCAA tournaments?
Or let me hope.
Part of the reason the NCAA tournament is so great is the combination of messy early rounds and breathtaking finishes at the end, with upstart teams taking down higher ranked teams like the wind. .
Those kinds of games were popular in men’s tournaments. Think 13th seed Valparaiso, a school many Americans have never heard of, knocking out… ahem, Mississippi, 4th seed, after Bryce Drew’s final strike in the first round of the 1998 tournament. .
The hope that the Mississippi women’s team makes it into Stanford, undaunted and undaunted on the road to victory, is a sign of things to come.
But who knows. Predicting the future in sports is often the chore of fools, so after watching Sunday’s thrilling game from the side, I’ll just say this:
More, please!
